Archive for the ‘Belgravia’ Category

At the flat of Lord Boothby, situated at the prestigious address No 1 Eaton Square in Belgravia, three men looked up towards a photographer who duly pressed the camera’s shutter. The resultant photograph featured, perched on a small sofa, Lord Boothby himself, Ronnie Kray the infamous East End gangster, and Ronnie’s friend, the good-looking young cat-burgler called Leslie Holt.

It was early 1964, and for the struggling Conservative government at the time, the photograph not only threatened to cause another scandal that rivalled the previous year’s Profumo affair, but it almost certainly enabled the Kray twins’ criminal career of extortion and protection to remain pretty well unchecked for the next five years.

Robert Boothby MP in 1945

Sir Robert Boothby filming outside Parliament in 1954

No 1 Eaton Square today

The Eton and Oxford educated Lord Robert Boothby was in 1964 one of the country’s more famous politicians (in March that year he had appeared on Eamonn Andrews’ This Is Your Life). He had entered Parliament at just 24 and had once been tipped as future leader of the Conservative party not least because he had been the private secretary and friend of Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill made him Minister of Food for the wartime government in 1939. However Boothby was not without his flaws and was sacked only a year later after lying to parliament about a financial deal with which he had intended to pay off his, not inconsiderable, gambling debts.

Boothby remained in politics and was even made a peer in 1958 by the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. It was a particularly benevolent act as the first (and last) Baron Boothby of Buchan and Rattray Head had been having an affair with the PM’s wife since around 1930. During this time Boothby fathered a child with Lady Macmillan (the Macmillans brought up Sarah Macmillan as their own) but in those days no one broke rank and told the voters. In fact, it never even got to Sarah herself – she was apparently casually and cruelly told who her real father was when she was 21.

The writer and broadcaster Sir Ludovic Kennedy (and Boothby’s cousin) said of him “…to my certain knowledge [Boothby] fathered at least three children by the wives of other men (two by one woman, one by another).” Kennedy also once called him, and to his face, “a shit of the highest order”; Boothby’s response was to rub his hands, give a deep chuckle and say “Well a bit. Not entirely.”

Boothby’s undeniable charm, along with his friends in very high places, kept any scurrilous rumours, malicious gossip and untoward publicity about him away from the front pages of Fleet Street . However Britain’s newspaper industry was beginning to develop a taste for Establishment blood.

Prime Minister Macmillan and his wife in 1960

The colourful, although up to now reasonably discreet, life of Boothby was shaken up on the 12th July 1964 when the Sunday Mirror, as part of an ongoing expose on ‘the biggest protection racket London has ever known’, ran a story under the headline “Peer and a gangster: Yard probe.” The newspaper claimed that the police were investigating a homosexual relationship between a “prominent peer and a leading thug in the London underworld”. The peer was a “household name” and that the inquiries embraced Mayfair parties attended by the peer and the notorious gangster. The following week the Sunday Mirror’s front page announced “The picture that we must not print”. However the newspaper helpfully described the picture, saying that it showed a gangster and a the peer in the latter’s Mayfair flat.

A few days later the German magazine Stern, not so worried about Britain’s libel laws, printed an article entitled ‘Lord Bobby In Trouble’ and went so far as naming Lord Boothby and Ronnie Kray. When the story broke Boothby was holidaying in France and later would disingenuously say that he was initially baffled as to the peer’s identity. When he arrived home he called his friend, former Labour Party chairman and journalist Tom Driberg who, according to Boothby, said ‘I”m sorry Bob, it’s you’.

Lord Boothby was at this stage in a tricky situation, while he admitted to having met Ronnie Kray during two or three business meetings, he flatly denied the rest of the allegations. However if he decided to do nothing about the situation it would seem as if was admitting the accusations, but if he sued the Mirror he could be involved in a lengthy and expensive court case with the risk that the tabloid would rake up all kinds of revelations to support the story.

At this stage the people who led the Tory party were convinced that the scandal was likely to rival the Profumo affair (which had similarly bubbled under the surface for a while) a situation the Tories could ill-afford as there was almost certainly a general election looming. Two Tory back-benchers had even reported to their Chief Whip that they had seen “Lord Boothby and (Tom) Driberg importuning males at a dog track and were involved with gangs of thugs who dispose of their money at the tracks”. At Chequers the story and its implications were debated by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, and the Prime Minister and they must have thought the worst.

Tom Driberg and Lord Boothby

Luckily for the Tories Boothby’s connection with Tom Driberg, which was coming to light, meant that the Labour party were in no mood to take advantage of the situation. If Boothby went to court then it seemed more than likely that Driberg’s private life would also be raked over and exposed. According to Francis Wheen – his biographer – Driberg was a regular at Ronnie Kray’s flat, where ‘rough, but compliant East End lads were served like so many canapes’.

It was known to most of Westminster and Fleet Street (Driberg had been the William Hickey gossip columnist in The Daily Express) that few attractive men were safe from Driberg’s attentions and he was, as a contemporary would describe him, “a voracious homosexual”. Homosexuality was then, of course, illegal – voracious or otherwise. By all accounts Driberg was an enthusiastic follower of the concept that there is no such thing as a heterosexual male, only that some are a bit obstinate.

In 1951, to the complete and utter disbelief of Westminster, Driberg announced that he was to marry an Ena Binfield. Churchill, shown a picture of the rather, it has to be said, plain bride-to-be, remarked, ‘Oh well, buggers can’t be choosers.’ A policeman at the commons expressed sympathy for Binfield: ‘Poor lady, she won’t know which way to turn.’

Driberg as William Hickey in 1940

Tom Driberg marries Ena Binfield

The involvement of Tom Driberg MP in the story meant that Harold Wilson’s personal solicitor, the overweight and rather louche solicitor Arnold Goodman became involved. To Wilson, as well as many others, Goodman came by the name ‘Mr Fixit’. The lawyer offered to represent Lord Boothby and advised by Goodman, Boothby wrote a famous letter to the Times denying all of the Mirror’s allegations. The letter stated that he was not a homosexual and that he had met the Ronald Kray;

“who is alleged to be king of the underworld, only three times on business matters and then by appointment in my flat, at his request and in the company of other people … In short, the whole affair is a tissue of atrocious lies.”

'Mr Fixit' Lord Goodman in 1965

Boothby also wrote to the Home Secretary explaining that he had not known Kray was a criminal, and had in any case turned down the business plan he had been discussing with him. Kray had wanted to be pictured with Boothby because he was a personality, and it would have been churlish to refuse. The Kray twins at this stage were not, to the general public anyway, particularly well-known but this was changing, much to the twins delight, because they liked having their photographs taken with well-known celebrities of which Lord Boothby was one.

with Judy Garland in 1964

Reggie Kray with Shirley Bassey

Krays with Barbara Windsor

with George Raft and Rocky Marciano

Ronnie with Christine Keeler and Leslie Holt

with Joe Louis

After The Times published the letter Goodman won a quick agreement from the International Printing Corporation, owners of the Sunday Mirror, saving Boothby from the court case he, and the Government, were dreading. This wasn’t all, Goodman won his client a record out-of-court settlement of £40,000 and a grovelling and demeaning public apology signed by Cecil King, the chairman of IPC.

Derek Jameson, the Mirror picture editor, and future editor of the Daily Express and News Of The World, at the time remembered that for a long time Fleet Street refused to go anywhere near the Krays: ‘Dodgy trouble, ₤ 40,000, not very nice,’ he said. Subsequently the Twins were known by the Mirror for years as ‘those well-known sporting brothers’.

The Commissioner of the Metropolitan police – Sir Joseph Simpson – had to deny publicly that there had been a police investigation of the Boothby-Kray affair. However since the beginning of 1964 the Kray twins and their gang had been under the scrutiny of Detective Chief Inspector Leonard Read, also know by his nick-name ‘Nipper.’

Leonard 'Nipper' Read

The 'well known sporting brothers' and their mother Violet, back in the day.

On January 10th 1965 the Kray twins were arrested and charged with demanding money with menaces from Hew McCowan the owner of a club in the West End called the Hideaway. They were refused bail and sent to court.

It was hard enough for Read to find anyone with enough suicidal tendencies to testify against the Krays as it was, but the case against them wasn’t helped when a month after their arrest Boothby stood up in the Lords and inquired whether the Government intended to keep the Kray twins in custody for an indefinite period? He added ‘I might say that I hold no brief for the Kray Brothers’. There was a complete uproar in the house after the question, to which Boothby shouted ‘we might as well pack up’.

On the way to court

Ronnie leaving the court a free man April 1965

The twins welcomed back home by their parents Violet and Jimmy 'Cannonball' Lee

At the end of the trial the jury failed to reach an agreement and a re-trial was ordered however the judge eventually stopped the trial finding for the defendants. It must have seen to Fleet Street and the Metropolitan police that the Krays had a complete hold over the Establishment (surely it is without doubt that the Krays must have been essentially blackmailing Boothby for him to ask questions in the House of Lords on their behalf) and indeed their control over London’s underworld continued seemingly unchecked for the next four years.

Wanda Sanna at her marriage to Lord Boothby 1967

Lord Boothby married for the second time in 1967 to a Sardinian woman called Wanda Sanna thirty-three years his junior. ‘Don’t you think I’m a lucky boy!’ he shouted out to well-wishers outside the ceremony at Caxton Hall round the corner from his flat. He died in Westminster in 1986 aged 86.

The Krays were arrested again in 1969 for the murders of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. Sixteen of their firm were arrested at the same time thus helping witnesses to come forward without fear of intimidation. As soon as people started speaking out it was relatively easy to gain a conviction. Ronnie and Reggie were sentenced to life-imprisonment with a non-parole period of 30 years for the murders of Cornell and McVitie, the longest sentences ever passed at the Central Criminal Court for murder.

Tom Driberg, known to many as ‘the most disreputable man in parliament’ was made a peer in 1974 and died of a heart-attack in the back of a taxi in the summer of 1976. Oh, for characters like Driberg (and Boothby for that matter) in these days of the horrifically bland New Labour politicians.

As for the third man in the picture, I can’t find out too much about what happened to the cat burglar Leslie Holt – he was far less in the public eye than the other characters in the story. He was Ronnie’s sometime driver and lover and he was used as occasional bait to entrap the likes of Robert Boothby and Tom Driberg (who both loved the occasional dangerous foray to the other side of the tracks). Holt eventually became the partner of a Dr Kells based in Harley Street and it was said that the society doctor would supply customers for his cat-burglary activities. It was a lucrative project that worked well until police became suspicious of the criminal double act. Holt suddenly died at the hands of Kells under anaesthetic for a foot injury and the doctor was arrested but eventually mysteriously acquitted.

An excellent documentary The Gangster and the Pervert Peer made by Blakeway about the relationship between Ronnie Kray and Lord Boothby will be broadcast on Channel 4, Monday 16th February 2009.

Here are some great pieces of music that were in the charts from around the time the Boothby scandal broke. You can imagine Leslie Holt tapping his feet to some of them at the Hideaway if not the other two protagonists in the picture. The picture that the Sunday Mirror dared not print.

On the 27th August 1967 Brian Epstein, The Beatles’ manager was found dead in his bed at 24 Chapel Street – his London home in Belgravia, and practically a stones throw from the grounds of Buckingham Palace. He’d taken, what was most likely, an accidental overdose of Carbital – a popular sleeping pill of the time. Epstein had in the last few years become a heavy drug user and in fact during a lot of that summer Epstein had been staying at The Priory, the infamous rehab clinic – trying to cure his acute insomnia and growing addiction to amphetamines.

Earlier that week Epstein had met up with The Beatles, for what would be the final time, while they were recording Your Mother Should Know at The Chappell Recording Studios for the up-coming Magical Mystery Tour. He was then planning to spend the August Bank Holiday weekend at his country home at Kingsley Hill in Sussex with his friends Geoffrey Ellis and Peter Brown, and he did indeed drive down there with them on Friday 25th. However later that same evening he got upset when an expected group of rent boys failed to arrive, and he left his friends and drove back up to his home in Chapel Street.

Epstein had long known he was homosexual, although it was not publicly known until long after his death (which was just a month before homosexuality was legalised in England). While he was in the Army during National Service in 1956 he had a tailor make an officer’s uniform that he wore when cruising the bars of London. He was arrested one night at the Army and Navy Club in Piccadilly by the Military Police, ostensibly for impersonating an officer, and although Epstein managed to avoid a court martial he was discharged from the Army after a psychiatrist described him as ‘emotionally and mentally unfit’ – an obvious army euphemism for homosexuality at the time.

Epstein ended up studying at RADA but was again arrested for ‘persistent importuning’, however this time he was blackmailed by an ex-guardsman called Billy Connolly causing him to drop out of the drama college in the third term. There was even a rumour of a sexual encounter between John Lennon and Epstein during a holiday they had together in Barcelona in April 1963 although Lennon always denied this, telling Playboy in 1980, “It was never consummated, but we had a pretty intense relationship.” However Lennon’s friend Pete Shotton wrote in his book ‘The Beatles, Lennon And Me’ that Lennon gave in to Epstein “I let him toss me off, and that was it.” By the summer of 1967 Epstein was regularly taking a huge amount of recreational and prescribed drugs and was allowing his strong attraction to very ‘rough trade’ and illicit encounters with abusive and violent men to put him into situations where further blackmail was likely.

During the same August bank holiday that Brian Epstein was planning to spend at Kingsley Hill, The Beatles had travelled by train to Bangor in North Wales in the company of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. It was there in Wales, on Sunday morning (and the very same day that the Sunday Express revealed that Pete Best, the Beatles’ former sacked drummer, was working in a bakery for 18 pounds a week) that they heard the shocking news of their managers’ death.

Epstein had telephoned Peter Brown at Kingsley Hill the day before at around 5pm, but apparently sounded groggy and Brown advised him to come back to Sussex by train and not risk driving. That was the last conversation anyone had with Brian Epstein. On Sunday morning his housekeeper arrived at his flat and got no response. She called a few of his friends and after a while they decided to break down the door to find Epstein lying dead in his bed. He was just 32 years old.

His death, at the inquest, was officially ruled accidental, caused probably by a gradual buildup of Carbitral in his system, and then mixed lethally with alcohol. He had taken six Carbitral pills in order to sleep, which was probably usual for Epstein, but meant that his tolerance had started to become deadly.

After his death, The Beatles quickly decided to manage themselves and within a week or so were recording I Am The Walrus. We can’t really tell what would have happened to the band if he had stayed alive but without the only manager they had ever known and his calming influence The Beatles grew apart and just over two years later they were no more.

The Death Of Brian Epstein

Brian Epstein interview

112 Eaton Square and the traitor John Amery

In 1942 during the Second World War a Harrow-educated English man called John Amery began making Nazi propaganda broadcasts from Berlin. At 112 Eaton Square in Belgravia his family, almost certainly, would have been listening intently to the wireless. What they heard would have been more than embarrassing for any family at the time, but it was especially so for this one, John Amery’s father Leo was a school friend of Winston Churchill’s and was currently the Secretary Of State for India and Burma in Churchill’s cabinet.

After the broadcast Leo Amery immediately called Churchill who exclaimed ‘Good God. No one should be blamed for the aberrations of a grown-up son’. The next day Leo went to his lawyer to disinherit his traitorous son.

Leopold Amery in 1940

John Amery was born into undoubted privilege in 1912, but even by the age of five a teacher described him as “an extremely abnormal boy, with a fixed attitude of an abnormal type and a tendency to live inside himself”. When he was ten he was sent to his father’s school Harrow where he climbed out at night, visited nightclubs in London and lost his virginity when he was just 14. He was sanctioned at school for “moral breakdown” and when taken to a psychologist by his parents was told he had “no moral sense of right and wrong”.

He was eventually sent to a school in Switzerland but came back to England after contracting syphilis by prostituting himself to men.

At the age of twenty he had managed to receive 74 driving convictions, usually because if he was driving and fancied a drink, he’d just stop his car and leave it in the middle of the road.

At around this age he announced that he was going to marry a Una Eveline Wing whom he described as an actress, and very rich. However she was known to the police more as a common prostitute. As Avery was still to young to marry without parental permission he ran away to Paris, living by cadging money from family and friends. The couple eventually married in Greece, but soon after, Amery was arrested trying to buy diamonds with a bad cheque.

John Amery and Una Eveline Wing in 1932

He carried a gun at all times, and it wasn’t paranoia that made him terrified of creditors finding him. With him everywhere he also carried a childhood teddy bear who he would buy comics and drinks. It was known that he was making money as a male prostitute, but also liked masochistic sex with the female variety.

By 1936, when incidentally he was declared bankrupt for oweing £6000, he became obsessed with the Nazi cause, believing Communism the utter fault of the Jews. When the Second World War was announced Amery was in Spain where he had been gun-running on behalf of Franco and the fascists. MI6, however, believed him no threat to national security describing him as a drunk “dissipated, both physically and morally.”

John Amery arrested in 1936

In 1942 he visited Germany via Vichy France and Amery suggested that the Germans consider forming a British anti-Bolshevik legion. Adolf Hitler was impressed by Amery and allowed him to remain in Germany as a guest of the Reich and on November 19, 1942 he broadcasted to Britain saying “Listeners will wonder what an Englishman is doing on the German radio tonight. I come forward without any bias, but just simply as an Englishman-to say to you: a crime is being committed against civilisation!”

“You are being lied to, your patriotism, your love for our England is being exploited by people who for the most part hardly have any right to be English. Between you and peace lies only the Jew and his puppets.”

In late 1944, and after the Germans realised that he was nothing more than a drunk, he travelled to Italy to support the Italian dictator Mussolini, although it wasn’t long before he was captured by Italian partisans. A young British officer called Captain Alan Whicker (yes, believe it or not, that one) was sent to find him and when they met, Amery apparently said “Thank God you’re here. I thought they were going to shoot me.” He appeared more worried about the whereabouts of his beloved teddy bear and his wive’s furs than his destiny back home. He was brought back to England – dressed in full fascist costume including jackboots and he was charged with high treason, which as a crime, had only one penalty: death.

Leo Amery, like many Tory MPs after the war lost his seat and his son’s trial took place shortly after on November 28, 1945, in Court One at the Old Bailey.

John Amery shocked everyone, not least his family, by pleading guilty -basically a suicide plea. A witness in the court said: “He was like an insect that falls on a hot stove and is withered, and what he did felt like an act of cruelty to the whole court. It was quite clear that he was morally satisfied and that he was congratulating himself on having at last, at the end of his muddled and frustrated existence, achieved an act crystalline in its clarity.”

The judge summed up by saying: “John Amery, I am satisfied that you knew what you did and that you did it intentionally and deliberately after you had received warning from your fellow countrymen that the course you were pursuing amounted to high treason. They called you a traitor and you heard them, but in spite of that you continued in that course. You now stand a self-confessed traitor to your king and country, and you have forfeited your right to live.”

Amery was only the second man in history to plea guilty to treason and the trial lasted just eight minutes. Despite medical reports labelling him psychotic, he was hanged by Albert Pierrepoint in Wandsworth Prison at 9am on December 19, at the age of 33.

Amery apparently said to the infamous hangman “Mr Pierrepoint, I’ve always wanted to meet you, but not, of course, under these circumstances.”

Pierrepoint later claimed that as he tightened the noose, Amery was “the bravest man I ever met”.

London is my beat

Another Nickel In The Machine is a blog about 20th century London, its history, its culture and its music.
If there's something that you'd like me to include, or perhaps remove, please contact me
here.
Follow this site on TWITTER @robnitm